


love, holding a scythe

by prettydizzeed



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Love, M/M, Murder Mystery, Mystery, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Clue | Cluedo, Scheming, Trauma, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:02:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29079054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: Greg knows that beggars—or, like, tactful requesters in his case, hopefully—can’t be choosers, but damn, Uncle Logan is rich, right? Couldn’t he have picked anywhere less creepy for his 80th birthday bash? The Roy’s must have like a dozen houses, why’d he have to show up at the one with tinted gothic windows and a lightning rod and fucking gargoyles, clutching his present in his hand so hard the wrapping paper wrinkles?(Cycles of abuse and how to break them. Also, a murder mystery.)
Relationships: Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans, Stewy Hosseini/Kendall Roy
Comments: 23
Kudos: 26





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i’ve been wanting to try out a murder mystery for over a year and these characters seemed like a great fit for the genre, so here goes!
> 
> warnings for this chapter: non-explicit character death, brief derogatory comment about a sex worker, brief instance of homophobic language & outing someone

Greg knows that beggars—or, like, tactful requesters in his case, hopefully—can’t be choosers, but damn, Uncle Logan is rich, right? Couldn’t he have picked anywhere less creepy for his 80th birthday bash? Like, the graveyard where Greg used to get high in high school would be a step up, seriously. The family—the Roys proper, not Greg’s cousin-but-actually-once-removed, my-granddad-is-rich-but-I-live-off-ramen ass—must have like a dozen houses, why’d he have to show up at the one with tinted gothic windows and a lightning rod and fucking gargoyles, clutching his present in his hand so hard the wrapping paper wrinkles?

He tries to tap the frankly menacing door knocker—what is that, a griffin?—as gently as possible, but the bang still echoes. Someone in a crisp uniform answers, sweeping his coat off and directing him to the parlor before disappearing as silently as they arrived.

There are, like, a lot of animal heads in the room, like, the toxic masculinity vibes are kinda suffocating. Greg has to duck a little to avoid getting impaled by a boar tusk. He gives a little half-wave and sits in the only open spot, tucking his legs together in an effort to make himself small and distinctly non-threat-like. The redhead in the chair across from him, who looks about as far from non-threat-like as a person can get, tilts her head. 

“Cousin Greg, right?” she asks, and he nods, maybe a little too many times. “Shiv.” She extends a hand, and he wonders wildly if he should kiss it or something before giving it a limp shake. 

“Pleased to have made your acquaintanceship,” he says, and she presses her lips together, eyes sparkling. “Uh, where should I, I brought—” he gestures at the gift. 

“Oh, a birthday present, huh? That was brave of you.” He blinks, not understanding but nervous all the same, and she summons a—what, servant? Is that appropriate?—hired individual with a minute movement of her hand. They take the slightly crumpled package away somewhere. Greg swallows.

A tall man walks up, dark hair, vaguely anxious expression that paradoxically puts Greg at ease—like, at least he isn’t the only one out of his depth and obvious about it amid so much polished disinterest—and hovers at Shiv’s side, pressing a quick kiss to her head. “Oh, uh, Tom, this is Greg,” she says. “Greg, Tom.” Greg gives a little wave, then tries to tuck his elbow back into as small of a volume as possible.

Tom blinks repeatedly, like maybe Greg won’t be there if he opens his eyes again. “Oh, I—I didn’t know there was going to be anyone new here today.”

“No, no, he’s just—he’s a cousin, you know how it is.” Tom nods despite his expression indicating that he does not, in fact, know how it is and actually would very much like someone to elucidate him. 

“Just trying to get in the good graces, as it were,” Greg says, and Tom’s face—it doesn’t soften, exactly, but his annoyance looks more put-on now, more like a mask to protect whatever small and raw thing is hiding beneath it. 

“Right,” Tom says, and then a woman who must be Marcia stands, stately and graceful, and announces dinner. Everyone files after her into the dining room, and Greg tries hard not to stare. Like, his grandpa has nice china and stuff, but 80% of the items in this room look like they’ll break if he looks at them too long. He lingers by the back of the room, shuffling in place, and takes the last chair available once everyone else is seated, then spends the couple of minutes before the salad is brought out making small talk with the wannabe dictator at his elbow and trying very hard not to engage Tom in an accidental round of footsie. Like most things in the world, this table wasn’t made with the expectation of someone like him sitting at it.

Greg doesn’t even make it through the salad course without panicking. There are, like, way too many utensils at his plate, and he’s already feeling out of depth just being in his body and his nicest-but-not-nearly-good-enough shirt; what if someone notices that he’s using the wrong fucking fork and calls him on it, demands a genetic test on the basis that there’s no way a Roy could come this utterly classless, even somebody who’s Royness is less than in name only.

His thoughts are interrupted by Tom clearing his throat slightly too loud. Everyone else ignores him, but Greg looks up, and Tom subtly gestures to the fork on the outside. Greg gives him a shaky, relieved smile, and he nods in return. Greg keeps an eye on Tom’s hands all evening, noting what to use when and where to put it when he’s done. 

The meal is, like, an absurd amount of courses, none of which are more filling than a single ham, cheese, and cracker sandwich from Greg’s favorite kind of Lunchable. The whole thing emanates staggering levels of “bizarre rich people shit” energy, the type of luxury that’s just millimeters away from being repulsive. It’s some sort of Tantalus situation, right, food everywhere and never enough to eat? Greg is going to need to make a peanut butter sandwich at the youth hostel later, or maybe splurge on a Big Mac on his way back.

“So, Cousin Greg,” Roman says from a couple seats over, enunciating his name in a way that makes Greg nervous, “what do you do, man?”

“I, uh, I am currently in search of alternate employment after getting my hours cut. To, uh, zero.”

“So you got fired,” Shiv says, and Greg swallows, fidgeting.

“It was a complicated situation, uh, a matter of ideological incompatibility—”

“Oh, been there,” Roman says, making a scoffing sound. Connor promptly elbows him.

“I, for one, appreciate dining with a fellow man of principles,” he says, to which Shiv, Roman, and Kendall immediately respond with a chorus of questions about exactly what fucking principles he thinks he has. At the other end of the table and on Kendall’s left, a man Greg hasn’t met is doing his best to ignore Logan as much as humanly possible while refusing to be out-charmed when Marcia, at Logan’s elbow, does insist on addressing him. These people have sure mastered the questionable art of wielding manners as a weapon, huh—well, except Tom, who lacks the same air of ruthlessness about it and just comes across as almost endearingly desperate. 

After he finishes the last bite of his dessert—no candle, but an elegant 80 drawn in a substance Greg is suspicious contains real gold—Logan Roy sets his spoon down. Before him, the rest of the table falls silent, even those who have not yet finished eating looking around and setting their spoons, too, on the table.

“Well, Logan says, “you all know why I've called—most of you here,” he amends, glancing at Greg. “Ten million, a very reasonable number to keep my journalists steered away from your affair with a coworker, campaign-ruining and bank-breaking relationship with your kept woman, involuntary manslaughter, sexual deviance, and” —his gaze fixes on the man at his right, completing its devastating orbit around the table to halt hard and cold, even though the rest of his expression looks gently amused— “insider trading. Yet every one of you has refused this generous offer. You’ve left me with no alternative,” he says heavily, sighing an exhale that seems to carry real grief. “Enjoy destroying yourselves.”

Just then, the lights cut out, the mansion cast instantly into a full and disorienting darkness. Someone screams, then laughs at themself, and Roman makes a crack half under his breath, voice several degrees duller than earlier. There’s a crash of glass against the ground from another room, swearing in Spanish, or Italian, maybe. An indistinct thump. Then: a single gunshot, painfully loud in the uncomfortable silence. 

By the time Shiv has activated her phone flashlight, beam throwing horrified and cautious and bored expressions into violent exposure, Greg already knows what they will see. 

Logan Roy, seated at the head of the table, stern and inscrutable and dead.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for this chapter: derogatory comment about sex workers, mention of pet death

Someone yells _Fuck!_ Marcia chokes back a sob, which—it seems like no one else is having that problem. “Oh, god,” Shiv says. The lights still don’t come back on.

“Someone get the maid, tell her to find some candles,” Shiv says. “I’m calling the police.” There’s a scramble of pointing and “no, you”s until it’s finally determined that Connor has the short straw; he stumbles out of the room, phone flashlight in hand. Shiv slams her phone on the table hard enough that Tom and Greg jump. Stewy shoots her a lazily miffed look, apparently unconcerned about the dead body by his side.

“No service all of a sudden,” she says. “And this place hasn’t had a landline in, like, twenty years.”

“Fuck,” Tom says. “And no one’s driver will be here until Monday, right? Fuck.”

An employee scrambles in with a pile of candles in their arms, Connor at their heels, and hastily distributes them across the table and lights them, then scrams. They don’t look in Logan’s body’s direction once. 

Shiv takes a deep breath. “No, it’s okay, this could be good. Gives us time to get our story together.”

“Ohhh, you mean how to explain potential motives without revealing all of our deepest, darkest secrets that Dad was trying to extort us over,” Roman says, popping open a bottle of scotch he got from… somewhere. “Alright, let’s do this. I think it was Shiv.” Shiv gasps, affronted, and he shrugs. “Just saying. Listen, I’m in the clear, I had objectively the least depraved secret shame. Hi, I’m Roman, I work for the country’s most conservative company, and I’m a closeted homosexual. _‘Hi, Roman,’_ ” he intones in a lower voice. “Me and Shiv, team That’s Fucked Up But Not Actually Illegal.” 

“I, uh—no, I was wondering, I—I don’t think it was Shiv, but I am curious about the validity of the accusation,” Tom says, brow furrowed, fingers resting on his chin. He looks distant, like he’s taken himself somewhere far away or deep inside him, or maybe both. 

“What?” Shiv asks, bristling. “Of course it isn’t true.”

“Oh, come on, sis,” Roman says, rolling his eyes. “I didn’t just come out after 3X years of repression for shits and giggles. There’s no point in denying it. We all know Stewy is guilty of insider trading,” he gestures at the man Greg hadn’t recognized, “it’s just that someone finally has proof. We all know Connor’s girlfriend is a hooker—oh, _was,_ excuse me—and we all know that like her, Shiv couldn’t fuck only one person forever if her life depended on it. Good thing this isn’t, like, the Middle Ages or whatever. And what about you, you kill a guy?” he asks, glancing sideways at Kendall, who’s sat frozen ever since the words _involuntary manslaughter_ left Logan’s mouth, face drawn and ashen. 

“Yeah,” he admits quietly, shoulders slumping from both guilt and relief, and Roman nods, unbothered. 

“See? Sorry, Wambsgans.”

“No, it’s, uh, it’s fine,” Tom says, his face painfully readable. “I still don’t think it was Shiv,” he adds more quietly. 

“Well, it couldn’t have been Connor,” Shiv says. “Doesn’t have the balls for it.”

“Hey!” Connor objects, then seems to realize he’s arguing for his own implication in his father’s murder and shuts his mouth.

“You had to pay somebody to kill your fucking dog,” Kendall says flatly. Stewy’s gaze has never left him since Logan’s accusation, but it flickers now, to Connor and then back. He raises an eyebrow, and Kendall doesn’t smile, not nearly, but his jaw unclenches the barest amount. Or maybe that’s just a trick of the light.

“Yeah, so maybe he paid somebody,” Roman says, jerking a thumb at Greg.

“What?” Greg asks, looking frantically at the calculating faces around him—all except Tom’s, which still looks like someone hung up a curtain to try to cover a hurricane. “Why would I kill him? He—he gave me a job.”

Roman shrugs, unperturbed. “Just a thought. What do you think, Ken, what say you?”

“Stewy,” Kendall says, staring at where his own hands sit clasped on the table in front of him, and Stewy—grins, bright and broad. It changes his whole demeanor, if only briefly.

“I mean, I hated the old bastard, if that’s your idea of a motive, but who didn’t?”

Greg is about to protest, make up some quality of Uncle Logan’s that he’s always admired, but everyone around him shrugs like _yeah, fair enough,_ so he keeps his mouth shut. 

“I would appreciate if we could delay speaking ill of the dead at least until his body is cold,” Marcia says, harsh but measured, looking up from Logan’s shoulder for the first time in the conversation. Everyone else trades glances.

“Alright, bedtime,” Roman says, clapping his hands together. “Sweet dreams, everybody. Try not to burn the house down.” He takes a candle and walks off. After looking at Shiv, who shrugs, Connor pushes himself up from his chair and takes a candle, hurrying off down a hall as if the killer would look at the room occupied by at least one billionaire, a handful of Waystar Royco CEO hopefuls, and two accidentally significant social climbers, and decide that their next target should be a presidential hopeful bleeding cash out his ass whose base consists almost entirely of QAnon truthers, essential oil saleswomen, and guys who want to have the biggest bunker in the apocalypse. Shiv looks like she can’t decide whether to laugh at him or run after him. She tries her phone again.

Stewy touches Kendall’s shoulder in a carefully telegraphed movement. Kendall nods, barely, tearing his eyes from the tablecloth to his father’s corpse to Stewy. He stands, and Stewy puts a palm on his back, balancing two candles in his other hand, spinning some story out of bullshit that makes Kendall’s shoulders hunch a little bit less.

“I, uh, I wasn’t planning to stay the night?” Greg says, and Marcia turns to him, which, he really wishes she wouldn’t. She’s kinda freaking him out right now, all warring grief and composure, her face difficult to bring into focus, like she’s shifting rapidly between dimensions, flickering alongside the candlelight.

“There are no additional bedrooms,” she says. “I’ll have the maid bring some bedding to the parlor.”

“Thank you, yeah, or—or the library? To have a door that locks?” Not that he’s kidding himself that he’s a prime candidate for sobrin-once-removed-icide or anything, but like, this whole situation is scary as fuck and he’s really only keeping it together because he knows none of these people are about to comfort him if and when he breaks down crying, so he’d really rather do it in private, thanks. 

Marcia sighs but nods. “Very well.” 

Tom shifts in his seat. “Oh, Marcia, could I, um, could I also request some bedding in the library, with Cousin Greg?”

So much for a nice solo panic attack. Tom will just have to deal with the sound effects and hope Greg doesn’t kill him in the night, now won’t he. 

(Greg isn’t worried about Tom killing _him_ in the night; besides Greg’s aforementioned unlikeliness as a murder target, Tom gives off that specific combination of toxic masculinity and repression that suggests if he was going to kill someone, it’d be, like, a crime of passion, fit of rage type of thing, not the calculated act Logan’s extermination appears to have been. Tom—well, Greg hasn’t known him very long, to be fair, but Tom doesn’t seem to have the attention span to play that kind of long game. Not that Greg is one to talk.)

“What the fuck?” Shiv asks. “Tom, you just said I didn’t do it.”

“No, yeah, this is not because I think you’re a murderer. This is because I… I don’t particularly fancy sharing a bed with my ex.”

“Seriously?” Shiv demands. “That’s seriously how you’re going to do this. In front of my dad’s widow and my fucking Cousin Greg.” 

“I, I, I’m not here,” Greg stammers, putting his hands up. “I am totally tuned out. A non-observer. A fly off the wall, trying to escape out the window.”

Shiv ignores him. “No, I’m serious, Tom. Did you just break up with me?”

“Can you honestly say you didn’t sleep with him? Whoever the fuck he is?” Tom asks, and Shiv swallows, sets her shoulders, grabs a candle, and storms off. 

“So,” Greg says after a minute, tapping his fingers on the table. “Library bros. _Durmiendo en la biblioteca._ Together.”

Tom sighs. “Right, then, let’s go.”

They each take a candle and follow the maid Marcia has summoned. Greg can’t help glancing at his great-uncle as he leaves, seeing the slope of his hairline over Marcia’s shoulder. Blood in his beard. The gun in his hand.

Greg wants suddenly and desperately to hear his mom’s voice. 

When they’ve piled the assorted pillows and blankets on the floor and turned the deadbolt, Greg takes out his phone, hoping he can maybe find an old voicemail of hers or something. Instead, what he sees makes him pause.

“Tom?” he asks. 

Tom looks up from where he’s been—well, just sitting, really, perched atop some pillows, arms wrapped around his knees, staring into space. “What is it, Greg?” He’s trying to sound annoyed, probably, but it just comes across as concerned.

“Tom, uh, do you—do you have cell service? Because I have cell service.”

Tom takes out his phone. “What? No, Shiv said—” He stops, looking at the screen. “Maybe the tower got fixed or something.”

“Yeah, maybe.” 

“I mean, why would she lie about that?” Tom continues. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Should we, like, call the police?” Greg asks, twisting his hands together. 

“And have them do what, Greg? It’s possible someone in this house doesn’t want them here, and maybe it’s because she’s a killer, but—but maybe she’s right. Shiv said we need time to get the story together, remember? If the police show up right now, they’ve got eight suspects, six of which are rich and powerful enough to weasel themselves out of any accusations that get pinned to them, much less any repercussions, and then who ends up taking the fall? The idiot who just dumped his connection to the Roy family name and poor old Cousin Greg.” Tom sighs, running a hand through his hair. The candlelight makes it cast sharp shadows on the wall, accentuating every place it’s standing up. “No, we need—we need to figure this out for ourselves, Greg,” Tom says, looking him in the eye. “That’s the only way we get out of this unscathed.”

“O–okay,” Greg says, and Tom nods, like that settles it. “I’m—I’m really fucking broke, dude, I can’t go to jail,” Greg admits, the words rushed in an attempt to generate enough inertia to get them out his throat. 

“I won’t let that happen, Greg. I’ll look after you.”

Greg isn’t sure, exactly, how Tom plans to do that, with a murderer on the loose and a house full of people who wouldn’t hesitate to let either of them take the fall, but—it makes him feel better anyway, soothes his heart rate enough to let him drift into a fitful sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i’d love to hear y’all’s thoughts on who you think did it if you want to share in the comments or on tumblr :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for homophobic slurs, said by a gay character

Greg wakes up before Tom, which sucks because it means he isn’t asleep and therefore has to once again cope with the reality in which he’s stuck in a creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere with a fucking murderer, but it’s also a good thing because it means he can try to rummage through Uncle Logan’s bookshelves as quietly as possible without Tom knowing. It takes a while, but he finally finds the family Bible, and what he’s looking for inside it: a slight asymmetry about halfway through, the nearby pages puckering around where two have been glued together. Greg roots through the desk until he finds a letter opener, shooting glances at Tom’s sleeping form every few seconds, and sets to carefully sawing the pages apart. His grandpa had taught him how to do this once when he was maybe ten, told Greg to check his Bible when he died. Greg wasn’t sure what was in there, exactly, cash or bonds or what, but Grandpa Ewan had made a weird comment about it being the only book worth desecrating and you couldn’t hide your priorities from God, anyway, or something. Greg’s always figured his real reasons are probably more traditional than intellectual, like, maybe he remembered his mom doing that when they were dirt poor in Scotland, and this seems to prove him right: Uncle Logan has the same habit. 

Had. Yeah. Fuck.

Anyway, there are several slips of paper between the pages, tissue-thin, that Greg has to stick his thumb on top of to keep from blowing everywhere. Hopefully no one, like, dusts for fingerprints. On each paper is a name, and beneath it a string of characters—passwords, maybe? Parts of a URL? Greg flips through them:  _ Connor. Kendall. Roman. Shiv. Marcia.  _ There’s no list of letters and numbers on the last one, just her name. Huh. And it feels like someone is missing; Greg thinks through the table layout last night and remembers—Stewy. He must’ve beaten him to it, somehow, or maybe Kendall wanted to keep his friend out of an otherwise family affair, although Greg isn’t sure why he wouldn’t take his own paper, too, in that case. Either way, Greg slides the scraps of paper into an envelope he’d found in the desk and pockets it, then closes the Bible and puts it back, but not before catching a sentence on one of the pages he’d unglued: 

_ As for his father, because he practiced extortion, robbed his brother, and did that which is not good among his people, behold, he shall die for his sin. _

“Mighty ominous,” Greg mutters to himself as he steps back towards the pile of bedding, planning to “wake up” after Tom does, but he’s already feeling a bit better. Always helps to have some insurance. Well, as long as no one kills him before he gets the chance to use it.

When Greg and Tom emerge for breakfast, he’s shocked at the state of the dining room. Not because it looks like a grisly murder occurred there less than twelve hours prior, but rather the opposite—the table and floor are spotless, no blood to be seen, and Uncle Logan’s body has been… relocated. Greg is pretty sure he doesn’t want to know where. There’s a row of silver serving dishes on a table against the wall, and Kendall and Roman sit at the table already, eating breakfast.

“Pretty fucked up, huh?” Greg asks as he steps beside Stewy, picking up a plate. Like, what exactly constitutes appropriate small talk after witnessing a murder together, anyway?

Stewy doesn’t seem to mind, at least. “Eh,” he shrugs, “I’m surprised it was just blackmail. Especially with Roman,” he adds, which, Greg was under the impression that Roman’s supposed offense was the  _ least _ egregious, but okay. “You know what the old bastard said he’d do if one of his kids was gay?” Stewy asks, foregoing the tongs to pick a mini quiche up with his fingers and popping it in his mouth.

“N–no?” Greg asks, stopping his spooning of scrambled eggs on his plate to look at him. He’s trying to avoid any foods that could possibly hide parts of a human corpse, just in case, and eggs seem like a safe bet.

“Yeah. You don’t want to.” 

Greg swallows. “My, uh, my mom said I was lucky, being a little more distant from the epicenter, per se. That none of his kids would be able to, like, have a life until after he died, because he took up the life force of all of them.”

Stewy raises an eyebrow, and Greg worries he’s said something wrong until he sighs and tilts his head a bit. If Greg didn’t know better, he’d say Stewy was begrudgingly impressed. “Smart lady.” 

“Yeah,” Greg says, ducking his head and smiling to himself. God, he misses his mom, wishes he could call her for advice without breaking his and Tom’s mutual agreement to pretend their phones don’t work. “Yeah, she’s—” he starts to continue, but when he raises his gaze, Stewy has already walked off to sit down. 

Greg tries to stay as far out of the way as possible with his own food, a decision he’s grateful for when Shiv enters and Tom looks up, gaze uncomfortably raw. “Shiv,” he says, voice gentle enough that Greg wants to wince, “How are you?”

Shiv stops. “I don’t know, Tom, my dad got murdered in front of me and then my boyfriend thought that was a great time for us to break up, so, I’m great. How was sleeping on the floor?”

“Fine,” Tom says, looking down at his plate dejectedly. Greg tries to beat his own personal record for how little a volume of space he can occupy. 

“So,” Shiv says when she’s eaten, setting her fork down with an audible clink, “are we gonna do this or what?”

“Connor isn’t here,” Roman points out as Greg tries to figure out what the hell she’s referring to, and Shiv rolls her eyes.

“I’m sure his excellent analysis will be sorely missed,” Kendall says, but there’s not as much bite to it as there should be, his voice dull at its edges. 

“Marcia,” Shiv says firmly, ignoring them. She ticks off offenses on her fingers. “We don’t know shit about her life before Paris, her previous husband’s death was suspicious as fuck, and she and Dad had been having marriage troubles. And he literally tried a couple hours before his death to get us to give her extra weight on the board, so.”

“Wait, Marcia and Dad were having lovers’ quarrels?” Roman asks, leaning forward on his elbows. “What about?”

Shiv shrugs. “My guy says Dad was having an affair with this woman, uh, Raven.”

“Rhea,” Marcia corrects from the doorway, her mouth a thin line. Greg is totally struck through with terror, but Shiv doesn’t even blink.

“Ooh,” Stewy whistles. “That one’s almost poetic.”

“Huh?” Greg asks, too curious to resist but also desperately wanting to keep the conversation flowing so no one has to confess to Marcia that her stepkids were just accusing her of their dad’s death.

“Ignore him,” Kendall says, “He’s high off his own pretentiousness.” 

“Plus coke,” Stewy adds proudly, folding his hands behind his head. “Rhea,” he explains, “wife-slash-sister of Kronos, the Titan whose accomplishments included eating all his kids. I’m just saying, it’s a halfway decent metaphor.”

Kendall rolls his eyes, but he looks—a little less pale, maybe, less like he was the one who died last night. “Okay, we get it, you were a Classics minor.”

“If you’re finished,” Marcia says, giving Stewy a look that would make Greg tremble but just earns her a lazy smirk, “I was under the impression it would be inappropriate to accuse one of Logan’s loved ones of his death. Especially behind their back.”

“Oh, please,” Shiv says. “It had to be one of us. No point pussyfooting around the issue.”

“Well,” Marcia says, “on the off chance that I am in fact allowed to say something in my defense, you should know I cannot fire a gun.”

“Please, even if that were true, it’s not like it’d be too difficult at point-blank range.” Roman puts a finger gun to the side of Kendall’s head to illustrate, and Kendall shakes him off. 

“I think Roman,” Marcia announces, and Kendall laughs a little too loudly.

“Yeah, the only way that’d work is if Dad  _ didn’t  _ keep his balls in a jar on his desk.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Roman says, crossing his arms. “You’re one to talk, over there in your fucking Waystar Royco chastity cage.”

“Boys, boys, both your dicks are tiny,” Shiv interjects, and Greg tries very hard not to snort. “Anyway, I think Rome had the least going for him in terms of motive, don’t you?”

“Really,” Marcia says, folding her arms. “The COO would not remotely be in the running for taking over the company.”

“Not when the COO is Roman,” Shiv says as if it’s obvious, and Roman tips his chair back.

“Yeah, thanks for the vote of confidence, sis. Too much of a fuck-up to even kill someone correctly.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, would you rather me advocate for you to end up behind bars?”

Greg leans forward and tries to catch Tom’s eye. After a few minutes of gesturing as subtly as possible while attempting to tune out the Roy siblings’ bickering, Tom finally looks at him, and Greg tries to communicate  _ Please god can I get out of here?  _ without opening his mouth. Tom’s eyes soften and he nods minutely, and Greg gratefully slips out, setting his plate down in the kitchen and making his way to the bathroom. He locks the door and presses his hot forehead to the cool mirror, trying to slow his breathing. 

He ends up dicking around on his phone for a couple of hours while no one is around to notice—it’s not like there aren’t other bathrooms in the place—alternating between pacing and folding his limbs onto the floor. He’s just considering convincing himself to stand up and find some food, maybe, if the dining room is no longer occupied, when he hears a sound through the vent by his hip. 

Well, fuck it, not like this whole situation can get much worse. Greg lays down and presses his ear to the vent. 

“—should just say I did it,” muffled and dejected. Kendall, Greg realizes. 

Stewy, unsurprisingly, speaks next: “Did you?”

A shuffling noise. “Well no, but—but I killed somebody else, right? So maybe—”

“Bullshit. Involuntary manslaughter, that’s totally different, Ken—if you go on trial for premeditated murder with a bunch of witnesses ready to throw you under the bus, no amount of money is gonna get you out of it. And I know you think you deserve it, because of whoever the fuck that died, but I’m saying to you, fuck what you think you deserve. We let Shiv get whatever story together she wants, and we get out of this, and you get to experience life without your dad kicking you in the ribs every two seconds. Okay?”

A sound—a sniffle, maybe? A quick inhale? “Okay,” Kendall says, shaky but convinced, and Greg smiles a little despite himself. Sure, it wasn’t the clue he was hoping for, but it was… kind of sweet, weirdly. And Stewy underlined the importance of Greg and Tom keeping themselves off of Shiv’s suspect list, since at least a third of the house is willing to support her call, no matter what it is. After a few minutes of only indistinct noises from the vent, Greg stands and dusts himself off. Time to locate some lunch, maybe, and find out from Tom what kind of a shitshow he missed out on this morning.

When Greg steps out of the bathroom, Roman is leaning against the opposite wall.

“World’s longest masturbation session?” he asks, smirking, and Greg shakes his head, lets the strands stay hanging in his face.

“Uh, no, I, uh, just needed some—”

“Privacy?”

“I, uh, I was going to say space. Things got kind of… tense, earlier.”

“Yeah, well, be glad you’ve never been around for Thanksgiving,” Roman says, pushing off the wall and starting to walk down the hallway, clearly expecting Greg to follow. Greg does.

“Listen, I need a favor,” Roman announces.

“What, uh, what is it?” Greg asks, although it’s not the first question that comes to mind. What’s in it for him can be addressed later.

“You seem like a, hmm, how did dear old Dad put it, a fellow sexual deviant, yeah?”

“I’m not sure what you mean?” Greg says, although he’s, like, not entirely unsure, and he’s not sure he wants to know where this is going.

Roman rolls his eyes. “A homosexual, Gregory. A faggot. A pansy. A sucker of cocks and muncher of carpets. True or false?”

“Oh, uh, I mean, yeah, most of that—”

“Great. So you get what I mean when I say I’m fucking terrified right now, yeah?”

Greg looks down at him. From the brief time he’s spent around Roman, he’s figured that at least 85% of the man’s interactions with other human beings consist of total bullshit, but—Greg does get it, okay, and Roman, he does look pretty scared. “Yeah, a pretty, uh, unenviable position you’re in. I won’t say anything, if that’s what you mean.”

“Thanks, Cousin Greg, but no. Listen, my dad was a fucked up son of a bitch, right?”

“R–right,” Greg says when it becomes clear he’s expected to give an answer. Roman nods, satisfied.

“So I wouldn’t put it past him to have reporters on standby to release some of this crap the second anything happened to him, you know? So I need you to get on his computer, sometime when Marcia isn’t around—we’ll distract her, I don’t fucking know—and find out, like, what he’s got on me. Who has it, how to get it back, whether I need to call any exes to tell them to brace themselves, that sort of thing.”

“Oh,” Greg says, trying to bite back his excitement at the opportunity that’s been dropped into his lap. “Okay, yeah, I can do that.”

Roman nods again. “Of course you can. And listen, some of this shit is bound to get out anyway, so if there’s anything that could, you know, cast aspersions on his character, so to speak, I’d appreciate if you could pass it along.”

“Yeah. Yeah, totally.” 

Roman contorts strangely to clap him on the shoulder. “Come on, I’ll get you the passcode.”

Greg follows him, his step lighter than it's been since he entered this nightmare house. Talk about some fucking insurance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading so far! as before i’d love to hear your theories here or on tumblr :)
> 
> the Bible verse is Ezekiel 18:18

**Author's Note:**

> i’m on tumblr @campgender if you want to yell about this show!


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